Penn has a clear path to an Ivy Madness berth after pulling off one of its best Palestra homestands in years.
The Quakers (13-10, 6-4 Ivy) have a tight grip on third place in the League standings after using a late surge to rally past Columbia on Friday, 76-67, and following that effort up with an 82-76 triumph over Cornell in a game that was played within a possession for much of the evening.
Penn, by virtue of its head-to-head sweep over Cornell (12-11, 5-5), is effectively two games ahead of the Big Red with four to play. If the Quakers just go .500 in their remaining contests, they’ll be two steps away from their first trip to the NCAA Tournament since 2018.
It’s a position that few outside observers expected Penn to be in, given its opening KenPom ranking of 275 and consensus seventh-place pick in the Ivy preseason poll.
But now? The Quakers look like an ascending team in its first year under Fran McCaffery, who has taken a team which consists almost entirely of players he did not recruit and turned it into one of the most improved teams in the country.
How much so? We’ll get into that now, starting with how …